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The latest release of Red Hat's community Linux distribution, Fedora 9, a.k.a. 'Sulfur', is out. The Sulfur release adds a host of new features, including virtualization, authentication, networking, file system and yes, even features that will benefit desktop users. "All of those things really put the lie to any claims that Red Hat is abandoning the desktop," Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields said.

Blue Heron Network has demonstrated an Ubuntu Linux-based touchpanel PC aimed at helping patients in the early stages of neuro-degenerative conditions like Alzheimer's stay independent for as long as possible. The WiFi-enabled Reside@Home Monitor keeps homecare patients connected to family and caregivers via the Internet, the company says.

All communities develop rituals over time. One of the enduring linux-kernel rituals is the regular heated discussion on development processes and kernel quality. To an outside observer, these events can give the impression that the whole enterprise is about to come crashing down. But the reality is a lot like the New Year celebrations the author was privileged enough to see in Beijing: vast amounts of smoke and noise, but everybody gets back to work as usual the next day.

This is an advertisment for Vista on the Novell website. I especially like the line "Migrating to Vista? We can help you make the leap" alongside a picture of man in suit and tie plummeting to the earth off a tall building. Equally helpful was the ominous exhortation "Prepare now, Windows Vista is coming".

This document describes how to set up TrueCrypt 5.1a on Debian Etch (GNOME). Taken from the TrueCrypt page: "TrueCrypt is a software system for establishing and maintaining an on-the-fly-encrypted volume (data storage device). On-the-fly encryption means that data are automatically encrypted or decrypted right before they are loaded or saved, without any user intervention. No data stored on an encrypted volume can be read (decrypted) without using the correct password/keyfile(s) or correct encryption keys. Entire file system is encrypted (e.g., file names, folder names, contents of every file, free space, meta data, etc)."

Without an Internet connection, installing applications in Linux is a nightmare because of package dependencies. The aim of this guide is to help install applications in Ubuntu (should work with all apt based distribution with minimal modifications) when there is no Internet connection is available.

Are you looking for a free and open source music player that you can use no matter which operating system you boot or switch to during the day? Meet aTunes, a small competitor to both Amarok and Apple's iTunes. Its name sounds like a hybrid of the two, and it tries to have a unique combination of the best of both user experiences. aTunes is a Java-written, cross-platform music player. It supports a variety of common audio formats, including both open source and proprietary codecs, due to its MPlayer audio engine back end. Like many quickly evolving programs, it has a few issues, but the better outweighs the bitter.

On April 28, a California jury found Hans Reiser guilty of first-degree murder. There has been a lot of speculation in the press, both before and after the conviction, on what the loss of Mr. Reiser will mean for the Linux community. Much of that speculation, it seems, lacks an understanding of what Mr. Reiser's role in the community really was. Your editor will take no position on whether his conviction was correct or just. But there are things to be said about what this conviction will mean.

Assuming you have managed to find a wireless card that is working well with your Linux distribution, or perhaps you just settled for a hack-n’-hope solution with NDISWrapper, you need to settle on an application that you can use to connect to your wireless network.

Take most people in the market for a new computer. Put them in places like Costco or Best Buy - what do you think they will end up with? A new Ubuntu box from Dell? Nope. A Mac? Not even close. In reality, it will likely be something from HP, and it will be clearly designed for the Vista release of Windows.

As long as there are choices in computing platforms, there will be those that claim that their OS is the best over all others. In this article, I will work to put my own preferences aside, examine my years of experience with past clients who have used all three major platforms and why each made the most sense for them.

This HTML page contains the first chunk of a piece of journalism by Patrick Smith; the actual body copy runs to approximately 950 words of text. The average word in English is 5.5 characters long; add 1 character for punctuation or whitespace and we would reasonably expect this file to be on the close order of 6.5Kb in size. But it's not.

[Not really FOSS related but I thought it might be of interest to our readers. - Scott]

Dear me. Just because I recently talked about Windows XP SP3's virtues and vices, some people seem to think I've turned away from my beloved Linux systems. Nope, I'm still a rock-solid Linux desktop user. In fact, I'm writing this tale on my #2 desktop, which runs openSUSE 10.3. But, just because I use Linux all the time-my current office's desktop offerings include the aforementioned openSUSE, Mint 4.0, Ubuntu 8.04, MEPIS 7.0, Freespire 2.03-doesn't mean that I don't run other desktop operating systems. I do. XP SP3 has the lead with three systems running it-two on virtual machines under Linux and one natively; two Macs running Tiger and Leopard; a copy of the newest OpenSolaris that I'm still tuning, and one system that I tolerate having Vista SP1 on.

We finally finished our review of Shuttle's KPC K-4500, the Foresight Linux-based small form factor desktop that Shuttle announced a few weeks back. This review covers the lowest end complete system. Shuttle also offers a bare-bones K45 model (with no operating system) as well as a few others with higher-end hardware and Vista Basic.

Wine is nearing its 1.0 release, and we need your help to make sure it's a good one! Wine has been under heavy development in recent months, and some applications that used to work well no longer do. But we don't know which ones! Please help us find them, so we can fix them. Here's how:

Join us for an interesting discussion on open source clinical trial software the DIA Annual Meeting June 24th in Boston. This presentation will evaluate how open, standards-based software can alleviate the challenges of flexibility, interoperability, and cost in regulated clinical research environments. Presenters will discuss the unique advantages and challenges in developing and using open source software for tasks such as electronic data capture, and provide an overview of other open source technologies currently being used in clinical trials.

Fedora 9, the latest release from the Fedora Project, goes up for download on Tuesday. The ninth release of Fedora ushers in a number of changes aimed at making the venerable distribution a more newbie-friendly desktop, but longtime users needn't fear a great dumbing down; version 9 packs plenty of power user punch as well. Fedora is a community-driven distribution sponsored by Red Hat and, while Fedora may be best known as a popular server OS, most of the changes in Fedora 9 are aimed at making the system friendlier for desktop users.

"I like to make browsers do things that they weren't supposed to do," Brad Neuberg likes to say. As a developer advocate for Google Gears, Neuberg has a wide scope for pursuing this interest, not only as an active developer, but also as a frequent speaker at conferences. His message is that Gears is not a means of working offline with Internet content -- which, so far has been its main function in applications like Google Reader and Google Calendar -- but also a potential universal update mechanism for browsers that could help to keep the Web free.

What do you want your cell phone to be able to do? Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Hal Abelson put that question to about 20 computer science students this semester when he gave them one assignment: Design a software program for cell phones that use Google Inc.'s upcoming Android mobile operating system. In the process, they revealed the power of an open system like Android to shake up the mobile phone industry, where wireless companies are being pressured to loosen the control they have maintained over what devices do. If the brainstorms of these MIT students are an indication, phones will soon challenge the Internet as a source of innovation.

After I reviewed Alien Arena last year, some readers criticized my choice of that first-person shooter (FPS) as the best free software game I had played. Several suggested Nexuiz would have been a better choice. At the time, I had not played it. Now that I have tried Nexuiz 2.4, it has become my favorite free software FPS. Nexuiz runs on an improved Quake engine called DarkPlaces. The engine has been undergoing on-and-off development by Lord Havoc, the game's creator, for several years. On icculus.org, Lord Havoc says he developed a custom OpenGL-only engine for DarkPlaces, and other modifications that "support Windows WGL and Linux GLX and have greatly improved graphics and image quality."